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Conflict, Peace and Development in the Caribbean pp 259–283Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Alternative Approaches to Peace and Security in Africa

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Part of the book series: Macmillan International Political Economy Series ((IPES))

Abstract

Security in Africa as elsewhere in the Third World is inseparable from political economy both national and global: the continuing continental crisis of the last quarter of the twentieth century has generated a series of contradictions and confrontations, which have only just begun to be recognised and analysed by students of strategic (and peace, and development) studies. As most African states and leaders have come to confront shrinking economies so security issues have expanded beyond border disputes and non-alignment to include new threats to incumbent regimes from structural adjustments and guerrilla formations: destabilisation arising from IMF conditionalities and from income declines. Thus the fine lines between ‘national interest’ and regime survival and between regime survival and leadership longevity have largely disappeared as coping becomes the preoccupation. So the African debate is no longer external versus internal strategic priorities but rather security and development: security of leader, regime and state through economic renaissance or through political repression. Conversely, democratisation and development in Africa are closely correlated or, as the late Emmanuel Hansen (1987a, p. 7) asserts in his collection of indigenous perspectives on peace and development: ‘For most African scholars there is no difference between the peace problematic and the development problematic.’

The African perspective sees peace and development as intimately related: it sees peace not only as the resolution of conflict but as the transformation of extant social systems at both national and international levels. It is a concept which relates peace to the physical, social and existential needs of people (Hansen, 1987a, pp. 6–7).

the concept of security in the African context is necessarily broader than in the American or European situation. In the African context, state security is conceived as involving national integration, maintenance of congenial domestic ethnic and class order as well as protection of territorial integrity and defence against external intervention (Nweke, 1985, p. 11).

This is a considerably revised and expanded version of Timothy M. Shaw ‘Security Redefined: unconventional conflict in Africa’, in Stephen Wright and Jan Brownfoot (eds), Africa in World Politics (London: Macmillan. 1987), pp. 17–34.

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Authors
  1. Timothy M. Shaw
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  2. E. John Inegbedion
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Puerto Rico, USA

    Jorge Rodríguez Beruff (Associate Professor) (Associate Professor)

  2. Ministry of Health, Jamaica

    J. Peter Figueroa (Principal Medical Officer) (Principal Medical Officer)

  3. Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica

    J. Edward Greene (Director) (Director)

Copyright information

© 1991 Jorge Rodríguez Beruff, J. Peter Figueroa and J. Edward Greene

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Cite this chapter

Shaw, T.M., Inegbedion, E.J. (1991). Alternative Approaches to Peace and Security in Africa. In: Beruff, J.R., Figueroa, J.P., Greene, J.E. (eds) Conflict, Peace and Development in the Caribbean. Macmillan International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11877-9_11

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